French Lieutenant's Woman (Vintage Classics) [ペーパーバック]

The affair between Charles Smithson, amateur gentleman paleontologist, and Sarah Woodruff, alluring, forbidden "outcast," is, in many respects, no more than a ruse (readers who express disappointment at the ending have no doubt swallowed too much of the bait, reading the novel as conventional romance). The epigraph to the final chapter, Matthew Arnold's "True Piety Is Acting What One Knows," can be taken as a key to the story's compelling theme and purpose. The narrative is a variation on the quest pattern, with the salvation of the story's everyman-protagonist at stake. Moreover, his progress from ignorance to self-knowledge, contrary to Marxist theory and, for that matter, inexorable Darwinian laws of natural selection, requires that he separate himself from his "age," the very culture that has formed him, defined him, and threatens to deform him.

The climax in the story is not Charles' meeting with Sarah in the home of the Rossetti's but his epiphany, in Chapter 48, while viewing a Crucifix in the sanctuary of a church. At this moment he sees his preoccupation with fossils as representative of his society's fixation on custom, externals, and respectability at the expense of the interior self and its own priorities. Charles and Sarah find their heart's bliss "through" but certainly not "with" each other.

I read this novel at the same time I was reading "The English Patient," Michael Ondaatje's poetic novel that challenges spatial boundaries much as Fowles' narrative does the same with temporal ones. Ondaatje takes fewer chances, constructing a fantastic, impressionistic narrative that makes very few mistakes and admittedly casts a lingering spell. Fowles', on the other hand, risks a lot, especially with his frequent, self-referential intrusions into the narrative--potentially alienating some readers, whether on grounds that he's violated the implict author-reader contract or that he's naively "postmodernist." Regardless, Fowles' novel is the richer, greater achievement, and ultimately the less contrived and pretentious as well.

"The French Lieutenant's Woman" is capable of satisfying at many levels. It offers a comprehensive history of the Victorian era, a Dickensian gallery of characters, an dramatization of the faith-doubt struggle found in the poetry of Tennyson and Arnold, a critique of Victorian and modern cultural malaise, a postmodernist literary conceit, an archetypal journey with an existentialist twist. Above all, the attentive reader of this allusive, multi-layered, yet remarkably focused story will be rewarded with a unique understanding of narrative and the reader's place within it. The narrator's offering the reader a choice between two endings has the effect of "liberating" the narrative and relating it to the examined life of the reader's own present.

It's difficult to see how a triumph such as this could be excluded from any short list of greatest novels written in English during the second half of the twentieth century.

Sarah Woodruff (aka the French Lieutenant's Woman) is one of my favorite characters in literature. She is a complex, nuanced character, intriguingly covered by a delicate veil of mystery throughout the first half of the book. Her pain, her selfless sacrifice, and her courage are deeply and powerfully drawn. She is a true example of a woman ahead of her time, a woman who challenges the norms of her society by simply ignoring them. Her confidence and her quiet scorn for the Puritanism of the times in which she lives raise her to a level above the so-called moral leaders who condemn her. In a strange way, she is a true hero.

This book, written in the late 1960s but set one hundred years earlier, is a beautiful example of period literature. Fowles, through his remarkably genuine narrative voice, recreates the world of Victorian England in such a way that if it weren't for the occasional references to modern life you might think the book was a century older than it is. It is filled with all the pomp and formality you would expect, but also with a wit, dry humor, and quiet mocking of the period that lend it an added flavor.

But Fowles is not simply trying to create a period piece or social commentary. I believe that first and foremost he was creating a love story. I would put Charles and Sarah in the same category with Romeo and Juliet as far as love stories go. The relationship is developed slowly, so slow that it is exquisitely painful almost. And though the time they spend together is brief, it is filled with an unmistakable air of eventual tragedy.

The only question left in my mind is whether to categorize this book as a classic of modern fiction or of 19th century fiction. It could easily stand in either section of my bookshelf.

The scene when Charles and Sarah confront each other in the shed in the undercliff has more tension and suspense than a thousand horror movies, because it was so real.

In the intervening 30 years, I've re-read this novel every five years or so. Like other great works, each re-reading brings something new (because I continue to change).

The great tragedy, at least in my view, is that what has followed from John Fowles has never risen to the heights of this novel. Daniel Martin was a huge disappointment to me (so self-indulgent and empty). The Maggot has some moments, but was ultimately disappointing. Only The Magus, and, to a lesser degree, The Collector, rival The French Lieutentant's Woman.

That said, Fowles has always been his own man and has stuck to his view of the world. I've read some of his philosophy of life in the Aristos and found most of it to be inconsistent with my own world view.

But in this great book, Fowles and I connected. I hope when I'm ninety, I can sit down and read it again (and find something fresh and new).